Revisiting Joyce's Künstlerroman (Joyce Studies in Italy, 2017)

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Revisiting Joyce’s Künstlerroman (Joyce Studies in Italy, 2017)

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‘TELL US, AREN’T YOU AN ARTIST?’ (SH 26) – REVISITING JOYCE’S KÜNSTLERROMAN.1

In the infirmary at Clongowes Wood College, Stephen recalls a nurse- ry rhyme and feels moved by its words:

How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music” (P 22).

Stephen’s initial visceral responses to aural, visual and linguistic stim- uli will eventually morph into a sharp intellectual discernment and confidence in his own uniqueness, though they will also be muffled by moments of wariness:

[h]is thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire-consumed (P 177).

1 This essay is dedicated to Rosa Maria Bolletieri. It marks my celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 29th De- cember 1916, and is based on my presentation at the X James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference, University Roma Tre on 2nd February 2017. I thank organizers Franca Ruggi- eri and Enrico Terrinoni for allocating a separate session for my presentation; my Chair, Rosemary Guruswamy, for travel funds; and Kim Gainer (Radford University) and Steph- anie Nelson (Boston University) for astute comments that greatly improved this piece

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In this essay, a continuation of my discussion of the very young Ste- phen as a budding artist (Wawrzycka 2011),2 I wish to focus on the older Stephen and to reflect on Joyce’s engagement with the elements of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman, hoping, as I revisit Joycean literature on the subject, to bring into sharper relief the com- plexity of Joyce’s deployment of some of the elements of the genres, particularly of the Künstlerroman. The latter term has fallen from much critical discussion as most critics read A Portrait as a Bildungs- roman. But given that Joyce problematizes biographical and fictional writing by inflecting Stephen’s artistic development with his own, I want to propose that to read Joyce’s novel also as a Künstlerroman is to trace the nuances of the genre that appear to have been very much on Joyce’s mind. Tellingly, when Chester G. Anderson set out to pro- duce his iconic critical edition of A Portrait, he sought to “place the Portrait in the tradition of the Künstlerroman” (Anderson 1968: 3). One of his contributors, Harry Levin, does just that: for Levin, “[t]he Künstlerroman … is the only conception of the novel that is special- ized enough to include A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (Lev- in 1960: 42; 1968: 400).3 For J. H. Buckley, the Künstlerroman is “a tale of the orientation of an artist” and, indeed, he sees most of the English Bildungsroman novels of “youth or apprenticeship” as “a kind of Künstlerroman” (Buckley 1974: 13).4 In such novels the hero

2 See also note 17. 3 Levin’s “The Artist” (1968) originally appeared in his book, James Joyce (1960). Anderson also includes Maurice Beebe’s “Artist as Hero” which is an “Introduction” to Beebe’s Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts (1964), though it is the last chapter of that book, “The Return from Exile,” that offers a more comprehensive reading of A Portrait in terms of Stephen’s artistic development. Beebe sees Joyce’s A Portrait as “a demonstration of Stephen’s fulfilment as artist” (50), but rather than Künstlerroman, he uses the term “Künstlerdrama form” because works in the artist-hero tradition such as Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken and Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer were especially influential for Joyce (Beebe 1964: 267). 4 Buckley contrasts the English Bildungsroman with the German Bildungsroman, defined by Susanne Howe Noble as the “novel of all-around development or self-culture” with “a more or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience.” Howe Noble, 6; quoted in Buckley, 286 n.19.

234 emerges as an artist of sorts, a prose writer like David Copperfield or Ernest Pontifex, a poet like Stephen Dedalus, an artisan and as- piring intellectual like Hardy’s Jude, a painter like Lawrence’s Paul Morel or Maugham’s Philip Carey”. (Buckley 1974: 13)

Joyce stands out in this group, states Buckley, because he “sums up, even as he transforms, the traditions of the nineteenth-century Bild- ungsroman” and, even though Joyce “had no great respect for Goe- the,5 he referred to him several times in an early version of the Por- trait,” evidently

fascinated by Wilhelm Meister and a study of the artist at odds with a Philistine public and…by Wilhelm’s quest for self-culture, com- parable as it is to Stephen’s self-conscious dedication to his Daeda- lian destiny”. (Buckley 1974: 226)

Interestingly, Castle, in his early discussion of A Portrait as a Bild- ungsroman, “subsumes” the term Künstlerroman “under the term Bildungsroman” (Castle 1989: 25). Following suit, Weldon Thornton, also deems the distinction between the Bildungsroman and Künstler- roman inconsequential, finding “no significant differences” between the two terms in his reading of A Portrait (Thornton 1994: 183n.11). By contrast, Margaret McBride, in her book Ulysses and the Meta- morphosis of Stephen Dedalus (2001), discusses Stephen as a protagonist of the Künstlerroman and proffers examples of how Joyce revo-

5 The footnote here is Buckley’s; it directs readers to Epstein (1971), pp. 128-129, 200. Buckley adds: “Epstein cites three mentions of Goethe in Stephen Hero and one in the published Portrait. He argues that the battle of the puppets David and Goliath in Meis- ter suggested to Joyce the struggle of the artist against a hostile public. I suggest the theme of self-directed Bildung as the most striking parallel between Meister and the Por- trait” (Buckley 1974: n.2, 320-321).

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lutionized the genre (McBride 2001: 12, 39).6 Castle revisits the Eng- lish Bildungsroman in his 2003 essay, “Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce’s Modernist Bildungsroman” and in his 2006 book, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. With the Künstlerroman still subsumed, Castle’s discussion of characters in select Modernist nov- els7 centres not so much on the characters’ artistic growth but on a broader idea of Bildung.8 Castle also illuminates critical polemics on the very nature of the Bildungsroman between the Germanists for whom the Bildungsroman “cannot exist outside the terrain marked out for it by German Enlightenment thinkers nearly two hundred years ago” (Castle 2003, 670), and critics who see the genre as thriving in early modern literary traditions outside Germany. He cites Franco Moretti’s contention that the Bildungsroman, in Castle’s words,

enters a period of revival and transformation and becomes a pow- erful and relevant form for the negotiation of complex problems concerning identity, nationality, education, the role of the artist, and social as well as personal relationships. (Castle 2003, 670; my emphasis)

6 See especially McBride’s Chapter 2 for the Aristotelian underpinnings of the Kün- stlerroman (McBride 2001: 38-60). See also S. L. Goldberg (1963), esp. 72-75. 7 In addition to James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and Gerty MacDowell, Castle’s book also discusses Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Virginia Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace. The term Künstlerroman appears in Castle in reference to Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (2008: 271n75), and to Woolf’s The Voyage Out (2008: 290 n.201). 8 Bildung is understood as education through self-cultivation (Castle 2003: 665), an English equivalent to “coming of age” or “rites of passage” (Castle 2006: 7). Fritz Senn analyzes the term in great depth and points out that the noun “derives from verbs which in Old High German meant ‘to give shape and essence; or ‘to form or imitate a shape’; it could be applied to God the creator, reflexively it refers to natural forms.” Senn adds that “Oxen” fits that definition because the chapter is both “bilden and bilding (formation, creation, development, education, the generation of forms). … If you were to recognize all the stylistic semblances that Joyce confects, you would be said to have Bildung (education, breeding, culture, often a wide-ranging knowledge in the humanistic tradition)” (Senn, 1995: 66-67).

236 Thus, A Portrait emerges as a modernist variant of the Bildungsro- man, a form that allowed Joyce to “translate disempowerment into narratives of survival, even if survival meant descent and, ultimately, exile” (Castle 2003, 670). In my argument, A Portrait emerges also as a modernist variant of the Künstlerroman. Joyce’s modernist re-dress of both genres includes Stephen’s nonconformity and his denunciation of all authority, except for the rule of art. While the youthful “apprenticeship” of Ste- phen’s nineteenth century novelistic predecessors culminates in a largely seamless integration into adulthood, Joyce’s design offers no such “arrival” for Stephen. But Stephen’s pronounced “artistic” bent bolsters the novel’s status as Künstlerroman, well captured in Buck- ley’s phrase, “a tale of the orientation of an artist”, referenced above. And yet there are elements in A Portrait that somewhat destabilize this status. Let me explain by referring to Stephen’s use of the word “exile” in his critically celebrated phrase, “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning” (P 247). Joycean criticism tends to treat the phrase as a self-evident stance adopted by the young Stephen against the cul- tural and national milieu that wrought, but eventually, he felt, inhibit- ed him. From the narrative point of view, the term “exile” (and its function as a weapon) is a baffling gesture of projection: Stephen appears to see “exile” in terms of noble high-mindedness, or a trying-on of an armour of courage, or as a licence to proclaim himself apart from any social order. However, it could also be seen as a kind of cowardly pusillanimity on his part, a performative move as ambiguous as that of Miss Ivors’ seemingly victorious departure from the Morkan sisters’ party before Gabriel can regain the upper hand. We could ask then, is absenting oneself arming oneself? What complicates this question is that Stephen’s exile never materializes in the novel. In the last pages we see him prepare for a departure whose nature will not be clear until a chapter in another, still-unwritten, novel will disclose that Stephen’s brief sortie – never exile – was to Paris. While for Stephen exile is just a potentiality, for Joyce, as he writes A Portrait, it is an all

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too tangible actuality. In contrast to the novel’s earlier content, which follows the events from Joyce’s own life quite closely, any overlap between the real Joyce and the fictional Stephen cease around 1902/1904.9 And while to conflate character and creator is to court biographical fallacy, such an identification was not wholly discouraged by Joyce himself, as we see in his early use of “Stephen Daedalus” as a nom de plume,10 or in Herbert Gorman’s 1939 biography of Joyce. As early as 1915 W. B. Yeats also saw the novel (which he read seri- alized in The Egoist) as “a disguised autobiography.”11 Ellmann mentions “the special difficulties of the autobiographical novelist” (JJII 149) that have followed Joyce throughout his life and reminds us that Joyce had commented on this later in life to Louis Gillet: “when your work and life are but one, when they are interwoven in the same fabric, as in my case, there you are…” (Gillet 1958: 18).12 To me, the degree of Stephen’s fictionality problematizes A Portrait’s status as a Künstlerroman: while writers of the Künstlerroman (and of the Eng- lish Bildungsroman mentioned above) obviously draw on their own lives, when does the Künstlerroman cease being the Künstlerroman

9 In both versions of his biography, James Joyce, Richard Ellmann writes that Joyce’s departure for Paris from Kingstown Pier on 1st December 1902 is fused at the end of A Portrait with Joyce’s departure for Zurich/Trieste in 1904 (JJI 113; JJII 109). See also Robert Adams Day for a reading of the Stephen-Joyce of 1902-1904. 10 Stanislaus Joyce noted that early on “[his] brother condemn[ed] pseudonyms” even though he used one in his very early writings. He adds that Joyce ended up “bitterly regret[ing] the self-concealment. He did not feel that he had perpetrated bad literature of which he ought to be ashamed.” This begs the question about Joyce’s reasons for using a pseudonym in the first place, given the uncompromising self-confidence well-recorded in his letters, including those to Yeats and, especially, to Grant Richards. Stanislaus is quoted in The Critical Writings, 111. Mark Wollaeger (2003) writes that “Joyce’s openly symbolic name for his fictional surrogate provides an index to his self-mythologizing” through St. Stephen the martyr and Daedalus the artist/inventor (2003: 344-345). 11 See the letter from Yeats to A. Llewelyn Roberts, 29th July 1915, Letters II. 12 In Gillet, the French text reads: “Mais quand votre art et votre vie ne font qu’un, quand ils s’enchevêtrent (interwoven) dans le même tissue come c’est mon, allez-y voir…” (133). In Ellmann, the quote appears as: “when your work and life make one, when they are interwoven in the same fabric, as in my case, there you are…” (JJII 149).

238 and be just a plain autobiographical novel of artistic development? Is there a difference? If the Künstlerroman traces the development of a largely fic- tionalized13 protagonist-artist and culminates in some measurable artistic outcome recognizable in that artist’s novelistic milieu, an autobiographical novel of artistic development would be about a writer’s own artistic progress not necessarily crowned by a tangible artefact. By these criteria, A Portrait falls short of being a Künstlerroman. Cas- tle and Thornton concluded as much, as did Hugh Kenner much earlier, for whom “Stephen does not become an artist at all…but an aesthete” (Kenner 1947: 151).14 For Beebe, Stephen is no more an ac- complished artist at the novel’s end than is Proust’s Marcel (who “is at least ready to write the book we have just read”; Beebe 1964: 6). Both protagonists, continues Beebe, emancipated from social and familial burdens, participate in narratives whose themes – the “quest for self” and the conflict between life and art – make them into the “artist-as- hero” and “the artist-as-exile” (Beebe 1964: 6). Stephen’s famous

13 Literature on genres in term of the degree of the protagonists’ fictionality seems nonexistent, as far as I can ascertain. And if I’m splitting hairs here, Mark Wollaeger (2003) also implies that there is a (non-quantifiable) difference between autobiography and autobiographical fiction when he notes the “occasional critical practice of referring to a composite figure ‘Stephen/ Joyce’ as if Portrait and Ulysses were autobiographies instead of autobiographical fictions” (2003: 344, my emphasis); see also Wollaeger’s chapter, “Between Stephen and James: Portraits of Joyce as a Young Man.” On the “Ste- phen/Joyce” composite, see Margaret McBride (2001: 33-37). Fritz Senn remarks on characters that “become reflexive verbs” and we can “deduce the author himself who, bi- ographically, is all to all [characters]. All the works are, truistically, pièce de Joyce” (Senn 1995: 24-25). Of course, both Bildungsromane and Künstlerromane may be autobiographical, but a “true autobiography is necessarily always something of a fragment … A novel, on the other hand, must ideally like any work of art, have a self-subsistence, a form and meaning quite intelligible apart from the life of the novelist. The Bildungsroman as autobiographical novel accordingly poses some problems to both writer and reader…” (Buck- ley 1970: 94). 14 The label stuck; for instance, Buckley’s chapter on Joyce in his book, Seasons of Youth, is titled, “Portrait of James Joyce as Young Aesthete” (1974: 225-247). Sean Lat- ham, too, speculates that Stephen may be just a “pretentious young man who has mistaken his own alienation for an aesthetic calling” (2005: 29).

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pronouncement about the artist as “the God of the creation” who, in relation to his work, remains “invisible, refined out of existence, indif- ferent, paring his fingernails” (P 215), lands Stephen in Beebe’s Ivory Tower (Beebe 1974: 261-277)15 and earns him Buckley’s label as “dispassionate craftsman” (1974: 225). Such a godlike artist, however, stands only in theoretical and figurative relationship to Stephen who has yet to create something – and maybe grow those nails so that there is something to pare. The real-life Joyce-artist, before his exile, had some success on Dublin’s literary scene; the fictional Stephen creates nothing but the villanelle (discussed below) and this lack has significant implications for the novel’s status as Künstlerroman. There are precedents for characters in Joyce’s works who think of themselves as “artists”, but are “potential artists who do not live up to their apparent promise”; they are “artists manqué,” as Morris Beja dubs them (1989: 7). In Be- ja’s reading, such characters as Little Chandler, Mr. Duffy or Gabriel Conroy “may come to stress what the Wake calls…‘a poor trait of the artless’ (FW 114.32)” (Beja 1989:16). Stephen comes off as “an aspir- ing writer” (ibid.: 8) who creates a jingle (“Pull out his eyes”) out of “Dante” Riordan’s threats. Beja refers to Stephen as the “verbal artist” (ibid.: 9) who “composes this crude but moving poem” and “we begin to see other indications of the young child’s sensitivity to words and their sounds” (ibid.: 8). If for Buckley, A Portrait as a Bildungsroman is “strikingly successful in its depiction of childhood” (Buckley 1974: 231, my emphasis), Beja’s and my own reading stresses Stephen-as- child-artist, though Beja concludes that “after the ‘Apologise’ rhyme

15 Beebe addresses artist-hero novels without reference to the Germanic nomencla- ture and proposes his own taxonomy of the “portrait-of-the-artist novel” whereby “the in- dividual portraits of the artist” can be best grasped in the patterns of “the three interlock- ing themes: the Divided Self, the Ivory Tower, and the Sacred Fount” (1964:6). Beebe states, however, that “the ambivalence of Stephen’s dedication to art and life anticipates Joyce’s personal, post-Stephen solution to the conflict between the Ivory Tower and the Sacred Fount” (1964: 277; Beebe’s emphasis).

240 it’s downhill from then on” for Stephen “in terms of actual artistic or poetic accomplishment” (Beja 1989: 9). Maybe not: there is, after all, that villanelle. It has received mixed reviews from critics. Hugh Kenner famously deemed it the ef- fect of a wet dream (Kenner 1956: 123). For Buckley, the villanelle “hardly warrants the prediction of great things to come”; it only adds to “the fiction of Stephen’s talent” as he celebrates “his aesthetic the- ology” (Buckley 1974: 245) by proclaiming himself “a priest of the eternal imagination” (P 221). Wayne Booth asks whether Joyce in- tended the villanelle to be a “serious sign of Stephen’s artistry,” as he also proposes that the poem be not “judged but simply experienced” (Booth 1961: 328-329). Robert Scholes answers Booth’s questions cit- ing aesthetic and biographical evidence (Scholes 1964: 469-472 and passim).16 Charles Rossman takes both critics to task in a largely psy- chological reading of Stephen’s motives and intentions (Rossman 1975). For Beja, the villanelle is “a bit purple” (Beja 1989: 9). What- ever its merits, I would side with Booth about simply experiencing it. To do so is to experience the poetic rhythm of its cadences and the young poet’s rather remarkable craftsmanship in handling a rigid and limiting form. I would additionally argue that it is Joyce’s presentment of the process of artistic language formation in Stephen throughout the novel – the process that culminates in the villanelle’s emergence from the smithy of Stephen’s mind-soul – that tilts the novel towards the Künstlerroman: the sheer poetic force of Stephen’s language brings him closer to unfettering the artist within him, one who is already pre- figured in the Stephen of Clongowes Wood College. In my reading, Joyce plays with the Künstlerroman genre by reversing it: I see Ste- phen as the artist at his purest in the opening pages of A Portrait, with subsequent chapters presenting the development of a sensitive and discerning young man following the path of education, indoctrination, and initiation, as he navigates the nets – familial, political, ideological

16 Readers of Chester Anderson’s edition of A Portrait will find both Booth’s and Scholes’s discussions reproduced in the “Criticism” section (Booth: 455-467); (Scholes: 468-480).

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– that threaten his flight. And if such a maturation of a young man confirms Thornton’s and others’ reading of A Portrait as a modernist Bildungsroman, I would reiterate that the elements of the Künstlerro- man are equally manifest throughout the novel in Stephen’s premonition that his destiny is to be the artist.17 This unwavering sense of his fate is suggestive of the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις), understood as a deep fore-knowledge of the soul that underlies our ca- pacity “to grasp what is true and good in the world, for, without at least some dim memory of what we are looking for, it is impossible that we could ever find it, or know it when we did, as Plato demon- strates in Meno and recalls synoptically in Phaedo” (Wawrzycka 2011: 377). Here is how Stephen’s premonitions weave through the novel (all italics mine):

- Stephen learns unfamiliar words by heart because “through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he only dimly appre- hended” (P 62).

- The feeling that “he was different from others” never left Stephen; he longed (inspired by thoughts of Mercedes) “to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his

17 Already in Stephen Hero, Stephen realizes that “[t]he artist who could disentangle the subtler soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re- embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for its new office, he was the supreme artist” (SH 1944: 65; my emphasis). Aristotle states that “to the thinking soul images serve as present sensations . . . this is why the soul never thinks without an image” (De Anima III.431a 14-17). Stephen evokes images associated with Rody Kickham (a de- cent fellow), with Nasty Roche (a stink), with his mother (nice but not so nice when she cries), or with Cecil Thunder (belt, toe in the rump), and many others. Thus, we see a very young artist-to-be at the vulnerable moment when the boy’s thought is indistinguishable from his soul, an identification made by Democritus and reported by Aristotle in De Ani- ma (I.404a 31). See Wawrzycka, 2011: 374-375.

242 soul so constantly beheld” and “a premonition that lead him on told him that this image would encounter him” (P 65); he is again revisited by “an intuition or fore- knowledge of the future” (P 66).

- Sexual (brothel) and spiritual (retreat) rites behind him, Stephen rejects priesthood re-remembering having always “conceived himself as being apart in every order” (P 161).

- Timing his walk “to the fall of verses” (P 164), Stephen re- flects that “the end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path: and now beckoned him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him” (P 165).18

- Hearing his name (“Stephanos Daedalos”) – the name “of the fabulous artificer” – he recognizes it as “a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being” (P 168-169).

- His triumphant “Yes! Yes! Yes!” is followed by the feeling that “[h]e would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable” (P 170).

18 It is in this passage that Stephen, prompted by “a phrase from his treasure … – A day of dappled seaborne clouds” (166), meditates on the colour and “rhythmic rise and fall” of words (P 166). The language of this highly poetic passage (166-167), like the “birds” passage (224-226), goes a long way to show how Stephen crystalizes into a matur- ing poet.

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- By the time the echo of these words reappears as Stephen welcomes life and ventures famously “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (P 253), Stephen is poised to leave Ireland.

And poised to leave, vowing “silence, exile and cunning.” The last chapter, widely studied for Stephen’s pronouncements on art, has also been understood as (though I’d argue, mistaken for) the culmina- tion of Stephen’s artistic development. Stephen’s proclamations (“Ar- istotle had not defined pity and terror. I have”; P 204) and engage- ments with Aquinas (“Pulcra sunt quae visa placent” (207); “at pulci- tudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas …”; P 212), parsed with aplomb in English, strike one as rehearsed declama- tions of concepts performed by Stephen-the-actor, and a good actor, as we can judge from his dramatic role, adeptly imitating the school principal. And if projection and imitation are a constant in Stephen’s life, that’s not all bad; Aristotle reminds us that an instinct for imitation is one of the building blocks of intellectual growth and learning, as is the instinct for harmony or beauty. Stephen’s artistic instincts ex- pressed in the “Apologise” rhyme reach their poetic (if purplish) apex in the villanelle and fulfil the stipulations of the Künstlerroman’s genre in terms of content. The novel’s structure, however, complicates this resolve through its diary entries.19 Kenner suggests that “the diary form of the last seven pages disarms us with an illusion of auctorial impartiality” (1956: 123, my emphasis). Far from it: Joyce-the author dismantles the novel as a genre by ending it with a new voice that

19 Michael Levenson (2003) has written eloquently on the subject. His chapter in Wollaeger’s Casebook offers an overview of literature on the ending of A Portrait, including discussions by, among others, Kenneth Grose, Susan Lanser, Anthony Burgess and Robert Martin Adams (pp.184-185). Levenson’s own discussion situates Stephen’s diary entries in the diarist tradition (Pepys, Kafka, Burney, Turgenev, Lermontov) and posits that, in contrast to the diary’s traditional linear trajectory, Stephen’s diary repeats aspects of his earlier life. Levenson concludes that the novel’s ending intimates Stephen’s return rather than exile.

244 breaks up the unity of diction and by abandoning, in a grand modernist gesture, Aristotelian principles of plot: he offers no “end” to the well-presented “beginning” and “middle” of the novel. The actual exile of the artist is left out of the novel and the artist himself is left in- complete: he is the artist manqué presented in the Künstlerroman manqué – a fitting artistic product of Ireland’s culture manqué de- nounced by the young Joyce in his early critical writings and letters. Joyce’s aporetic ending makes A Portrait a new kind of Künstlerro- man, one that abandons the positivistic paradigms of its nineteenth- century forerunner that grant the protagonist fulfilment as an artist. Joyce instead injects the Künstlerroman with a modernist ethos by suspending Stephen in the realm of potentiality and unfinalizability. Or, as McBride puts it, Joyce’s Künstlerroman “manages to revolu- tionize the genre: Stephen’s story appears to culminate with, ironical- ly, the disintegration of its own artistic figure” (McBride 2001: 39). Stephen’s aporetic nature will be further articulated in Ulysses. But Joyce himself left for the Continent and did become the artist. Ellmann sees Joyce’s 1904 departure as “a strategy of combat” (1982: 110). I would add that Joyce grafts his own ambivalence about self-exile onto Stephen for whom exile’s double-edged implications are unknowable. Hence “cunning?” Fritz Senn reminds us that Ste- phen’s name in Greek – daidalos (δαίδαλος) – means cunningly wrought (Senn 1995:149), but, given that Joyce is writing A Portrait as an older and wiser man, he could be arming Stephen with cunning as a retrospective kind of gesture – Stephen would know from Skeat that the word means both “knowledge/skill” and “temptation/trial.” If cunning, a necessary result of exile, can be seen as a survival strategy by which Joyce-the-exile managed to navigate the new realms of place and art, the Künstlerroman emerges as a cunning medium through which to present the “cunningly wrought” artist in statu nas- cendi as he, to no end, forges his artistic identity by negotiating not

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exile but his own country’s nets of religion, nationalism, and colonial- ism.20 His creator, Joyce-the artist-exile, flew past them and soared.

Works Cited A Greek-English Lexicon (1996) Compiled by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Ox- ford: Oxford UP. Anderson, Chester G. (1968) Introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism, and Notes. New York: Viking. Aristotle (1957) De Anima. Trans. W. S. Hett, Cambridge: Harvard UP, Loeb Classical Library. Beebe, Maurice (1964) Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: from Goethe to Joyce, New York: New York U.P. --- (1968) “Artist as Hero”, in Anderson, Chester G. ed. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism, and Notes. New York: Viking: 340-357. Beja, Morris (1989) “A poor Trait of the Artless: The Artist Manqué in James Joyce,” in Joyce, the Artist Manqué, and Indeterminacy, Colin Smythe: 7-25. Booth, Wayne C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: U of Chicago Press. Buckley, J. H. (1970) “Autobiography in the English Bildungsroman,” in The In- terpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Cambridge: Harvard UP. --- (1974) Seasons of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Cam- bridge: Harvard UP. Castle, Gregory (1989) “The Book of Youth: Reading Joyce’s Bildungsroman,” Genre 22 (Spring): 21-40. --- (2003) “Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce’s Modernist Bildungs- roman,” James Joyce Quarterly, (40: 4): 665-690. --- (2006) Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, Gainesville: UP of Florida. Day, Robert Adams (1980) “How Stephen Wrote his Vampire Poem,” James Joyce Quarterly, (17: 2): 183-197. Ellmann, Richard (1959, 1982) James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford UP. Epstein, Edmund L. (1971) The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus, Carbondale: SIU Press.

20 See Castle (2006) where he discusses these aspects as elements of the Bildungs- roman (159-191).

246 Gillet, Louis (1958), Claybook for James Joyce. Trans. Georges Markow- Totevy, London and New York: Abelard-Schuman. Givens, Seon ed., (1948) Jams Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, New York: Vanguard Press Goldberg, S. L. (1963) The Classical Temper, London: Chatto and Windus. Gorman, Herbert (1939) James Joyce, New York: Farrah and Reinhart. Howe Nobbe, Suzanne (1930), Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, New York: Columbia UP. Joyce, James (1968) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Edited by Chester G. Anderson, New York: Viking. --- (1989) The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, Ith- aca: Cornell UP. --- (1944) Stephen Hero, London: Jonathan Cape. --- (1966) Letters II, ed. Richard Ellmann, New York: Viking. Kenner, Hugh (1948) “The Portrait in Perspective,” in Seon Givens, ed., James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, New York: Vanguard Press, 150-153. Latham, Sean (2005) Joyce’s Modernism. The National Library of Ireland Joyce Studies No. 17 Levenson, Michael (2003) “Stephen’s Diary in Joyce’s Portrait – The Shape of Life,” in Mark Wollaeger, ed., James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Casebook, Oxford: Oxford UP, 183-205. Levin, Harry (1960) James Joyce, New York: New Directions. --- (1968) “The Artist,” in Anderson, Chester G. ed. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism, and Notes. New York: Viking, 399-415. McBride, Margaret (2001), Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus, Lewisburg: Bucknell UP. Rossman, Charles (1975) “Stephen Dedalus’ Villanelle,” James Joyce Quarterly (12: 3): 281-293. Scholes, Robert (1964) “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?” PMLA, LXXXIX: 484-480 Senn, Fritz (1995) Inductive Scrutinies. Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill Dublin: Lilliput Press. Skeat, W. W (1993) An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Ox- ford: Oxford UP. Thornton, Weldon (1994) The Antimodernism of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Syracuse: Syracuse UP. Wawrzycka, Jolanta (2011) “A Portrait of Dedalus as a Very Young Artist: me- moria/nous poêtikos,” in A Joyceful of Talkatalka, Bononia UP: 373-381. Wollaeger, Mark (2003), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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